All posts in Small Business

In the first quarter of 2017, the AppStore and Playstore saw record revenues yet again with a whopping total of $15 billion worldwide, representing a year over year growth of 45%.

Add in other online sales and the amount of money being spent is astronomical.

But how do we process all these sales? And what means of processing is best for your company?

We’ve pondered the question at Process Street and decided to write up our findings. In this article, we’ll compare Stripe, Paypal, Square, and Braintree to see what each do and how they do it. We’ll analyze those findings and suggest which might be better for different kinds of businesses.

The key areas we’ll compare are:

Features – what do they offer and what can’t they do?

Pricing – where can we find those small gains which make a difference at scale?

Ease of use – can a regular person integrate it into their business, or is a developer needed?

But first, let’s look at some of the different use cases for these payment platforms to contextualize our investigation.

On one hand, you’ve got the usual duties of managing a team and dealing with clients. On the other, you have the added pressure of a single mistake changing “business as usual” into a $50 million malpractice lawsuit.

Now, I won’t claim to have expertise in any legal fields, but what I can do is trawl through hours of research to bring you the best law office management tips on offer.

In this post I’ll cover:

Document storage methods

Using cloud software (whether it’s appropriate, the benefits, and the risks)

Onboarding employees

How you can delegate work

Onboarding clients

How to arrange and conduct effective meetings with clients and employees

When you have a great idea for a startup or a service the first thing you desire to do is create it, talk about it, and see what people think.

In creating a minimum viable product, entrepreneurs choose between experiments that can validate or invalidate their assumptions about a business model. – N. Taylor Thompson

These experiments could be anything from interviews with potential customers, trying to build a client base on the promise of a future product, or building a basic version of your idea and testing it in the market.

That last one is what we’re going to focus on. How can you create software to make a product a reality?

For some people, this means sitting down and writing code. Line after line slowly pieces together the idea and shapes details until a version which works exists.

This is how we make software. It’s how we’ve always made software.

However, you wouldn’t think you needed years of coding experience to create a blog. You could just start a Medium account or a Tumblr, or whichever platform is trendy right now.

Because you’re not the only person who wanted to build a blog, other people with greater technical skill developed tools to help you build blogs without needing to code.

This makes it easier and faster for everyone. But it’s not just blogs which you can build without coding.

In this article, we’ll look at a number of different tools you can use to build a whole range of products by pointing and clicking and dragging and dropping.

If you want to make your product a reality, rapidly building a first working iteration is a very useful option to get started!

The Art of SaaS shows that even industry veterans are sick of unnecessary jargon and bloated descriptions.

Rather than spending thousands of words (or multiple books) trying to explain every variation of the SaaS model, it draws from the experiences of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid and Dave Rennyson in order to cover all of the basics of a quality SaaS business in less than 60 pages.

Being so short, an Art of SaaS review might seem redundant at first. Why not just read the book in about an hour and learn what the authors believe to be:

What SaaS is

The bargain between vendor and user

The importance of uptime (and how to maintain it)

The three priorities all teams should share

The three practices which achieve those priorities

The structure of every team, and how they should be managed

Well, in this post I’m going to cover both the core takeaways of The Art of SaaS and the context surrounding the book itself by drawing from other figures in the field.

I’ll show you why this odd little volume is worth reading and what pitfalls to avoid when taking it at face value.

Unsurprisingly, it’s what our users do too. They use Process Street to manage their internal processes and keep their teams working at maximum efficiency.

In our constant attempt to understand our users’ needs, we asked the community what their biggest pain points were. We wanted to see what obstacles hampered the process management of companies and how we could help them combat that.

Our research across 83 respondents gave us a great deal of insight but one key takeaway stood out:

42% of respondents said they had no time to create processes.

Even worse, a further 54% of those (23% of the total responses) say they are currently taking no steps to remedy this situation!

This post will attempt to tackle this problem and present actionable ways you can ramp up your process productionand save yourself time.

No matter what kind of business you’re in, if you have a supply chain then it’s vital that you have a system of logistics management processes to guide how that chain runs.

Without set, trackable methods for ordering and managing stock, fulfilling customer orders, inspecting your facilities and so on, you’re leaving the success of your business (and the level of waste) up to random human error.

“One participant described a customer who used air freight for items that went into long-term inventory. Another recounted how individuals ordered 100 units of a product which they had not even used 30 units of in the previous year. Uncoordinated buying led to different groups in the same facility paying different prices for the same goods and ordering uneconomically small quantities.” – MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, A Sickly Supply Chain

To stop this kind of inefficiency and needless waste, we here at Process Street have created these 8 free logistics management templates.

If all you want to know from this E Myth review is whether or not the book is worth reading, then go and buy a copy right now.

Michael Gerber passionately runs through the core reasons why so many small businesses fail from over 40 years of experience, and how to create a business that will be successful.

“Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort… Within five years, more than 80 percent of them – 800,00 – will have failed.”
– Michael E. Gerber, The E Myth Revisited, p. 2

The book is a fascinating insight into the experience of Gerber dealing with not only failing businesses, but the people in charge of them who are often at their wit’s end. His drive to help them and satisfaction in seeing them blossom into true business owners is infectious, leaving you enthusiastic to start your own journey after every chapter.

If you’re running a small business that isn’t getting off the ground, want to know how to create a business that works, or have ever thought about how you could make a successful business to fuel your ideal lifestyle, then keep reading.

Project proposals are how you can get management to act on your ideas. They’re the bottom-up version of a project request form.

They are how you can influence your company’s future.

Writing a project proposal isn’t rocket science, but it is a vital skill for being able to successfully pitch projects that you know will benefit your team and business as a whole. Casual conversations aren’t enough – you need to give a formal document which addresses concerns before your manager, CEO, and stakeholders have a chance to voice them.

Plus, having a set template for writing a proposal gives you a document which you can reference throughout the entire project. Instead of having to rely on notes and your vague memory of a water cooler conversation, you have set instructions to follow, and a defense against anyone who says that the project isn’t worth it.

It’s a great example of effective business process management – if anyone questions you, you can show them the project proposal and say “this was approved, and so this is what we’re going to do”.

For your business to survive it will need to evolve. For it to evolve, you need to make changes. Without a change management model, the success of those changes is up to nothing more than hope and dumb luck.

“Before King began announcing layoffs, he explained his reasons… to prepare them for the upcoming change. Without his transparency, British Airways could have experienced employee backlash and negative press around all the layoffs.” – Laura Troyani, 3 Examples of Organizational Change Done Right

A model which paved the way for them earning $284 million in profit (the highest in its industry) within ten years of the changes.

I’ve already gone over how to form your own change management strategy, so today I’ll break down the change management models you can use to do the same for your business.

As a business you need to be constantly evolving in order to survive and grow. At first you can oversee everything yourself, keeping tabs on everyone to make sure everything’s up to date and running as intended. Then you grow, and suddenly you don’t have time to monitor those changes. For all you know everyone could be saying “yeah, I did that yesterday”, but be cutting corners left and right.

That’s where having a change management strategy will save you.

By analyzing the changes you want to make and seeing how the rest of your company is affected, you can prepare your teams in advance and help guide them through the transition until the new method becomes routine. Whether you’re changing software, updating technology, hiring new staff, or starting a new project, everything can benefit from a solid change management strategy.